AMANDA HUNG[1] and WILSON CHENG[2]

Patent

According to the patent statistics published by the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office, new patent applications filed by non-residents totaled 31999 in 2016, which showed
an increase of 1% during 2016 compared to 2015. The home countries of the top five non-residents filing new patent applications were Japan (13349 cases), the US (7972 cases), Mainland China (2202 cases), South Korea (1900 cases), and Germany (1651 cases). The backlog of patent applications has been reduced and the average time to issue the First Office Action for patent applications has been shortened to twelve months from filing the request for examination.

Trademark

According to the most recent trademark statistics published by the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office, new applications filed by non-residents totaled 21752 which showed an increase of 2.76% in 2016 compared to 2015. The home countries of the top five non-residents filing new trademarks by country were Mainland China (4281 cases), the US (3735 cases), Japan (3669 cases), Hong Kong (1541 cases), and South Korea (1447 cases). For the past five years, the amount of inbound new filings has kept increasing and such steady growth reveals that more and more overseas trademark owners have confidence in protecting trademarks in Taiwan and further expand their trademark portfolios here.